Every breastfeeding mom knows that cradling your infant in your arms as you breastfeed can be exhausting at best. If you have a large baby, your arms get tired before they are even halfway finished eating. Having a nursing pillow makes breastfeeding easier and frees up your hands to do something else while your little one suckles to sleep. I've tried a couple nursing pillows but my favorite is the Boppy nursing pillow. It is a basic horseshoe shape and fits nicely around my body so that my daughter is at the right level to nurse. I can read or work on my laptop while I nurse (when she's sleeping) which makes me feel much less confined while breastfeeding. My partner bought me a Boppy for Christmas while I was pregnant, it was the first baby-related gift I had received and I was more than excited to get to use it once my daughter was born. We quickly learned that my partner had his own uses for the Boppy too. The shape of the Boppy contours the neck nicely, making it a wonderful pillow to sleep with (for adult use only).
We now have two Boppy pillows, one for the house and one for the car. Breastfeeding in public discreetly is a tricky matter so most of the time I just put up the sun screens in the front window and breastfeed in the backseat. The Boppy has made it much easier to get my daughter comfortable while allowing me to control just how much of myself gets exposed to peepers.
My partner loves Boppy, so we ended up getting the Boppy brand changing pad covers, the Boppy playmat, and Boppy slipcovers. When I get pregnant with our second child, I don't think it will be hard to convince him to buy the Boppy body pillow. It is a wonderful company that I feel comfortable supporting with products that we have found to be incredibly useful. As our daughter gets bigger we find that a lot of the "must-have" items we bought because all the gift registries tell you to get them ended up only being used for a couple months and then sitting useless in a corner of a room. Not so with the Boppy nursing pillow. I am so glad we made this investment! Moms beware--there are lots of items out there that you think you need, but when it comes down to it you aren't going to use everything.
Showing posts with label motherhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label motherhood. Show all posts
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Friday, December 28, 2007
Deconstructing Motherhood: Becoming a Modern Mom
At twenty-two years old I had big ideas about the reality of being a woman in a patriarchal society. I was minoring in Women's Studies, hoping to find my niche in the world by learning about the women who had already found their place in a phalocentric world. We were the daughters of the ultimate wave in feminism, our inhertance was anything we could dream of. We talked of moving off to big cities far from the Phoenix metropolitain area, having high powered jobs that would afford us the luxury of being financially secure without the aid of a man, or anyone for that matter. Having children and getting married were for those women who didn't go to college, or those who did and were only interested in earning their MRS. degree from a fellow student with higher ambitions then their own. To protect ourselves we became pro-contraception, pro-choice, and anti-marriage. Not only were we ambitious in our careers, but we would enjoy the same carefree relationships that our male couterparts often enjoyed without bothering to make a commitment. We, as women, had been oppressed for too long and now it was our time to shine, making sexual freedom, money, and power our reward for all our efforts.
They are great ideas, but not all they are cracked up to be when applied to the real world. It didn't take me long to realize that my power hungry female friends were not so different than my power hungry male friends, and I really didn't appreciate either. It was easy for me to buy into the no-commitments, no-children way of life because I had lost my parents at ten years old and was terrified of trying to learn how to love anyone after being isolated for so long. But that didn't really work out either. I was constantly looking for someone to share my life with, but my reservations about commitment kept me from ever truly trusting anyone, keeping myself closed off and lonely. I had big dreams about moving to New York, having my own flat, being an editor for a publishing house, and spending my life travelling and having as little responsbility as life would allow. Except I didn't want to do it alone. I was lost in ambivalence about what I believed I should be doing as a woman of the twenty-first century and what it was that I truly wanted to do.
The August after I turned twenty-two changed all of that. I was pregnant. The father of my unborn child was my parnter of six months, but I knew without a shadow of doubt he would be a wonderful father... more than that, I loved him and realized I didn't want to imagine my life without him in it. We did our share of talking and fighting and going back and forth about what bringing a child into the world would do to our relationship, our careers, and our personal lives, but in the end we both still very much wanted this little miracle growing in my uterus. So it began. Unmarried, still in school, and without much of a plan, I travelled blindly into the next stage of my life: Motherhood.
There are many "normal" thoughts that cross a woman's mind while she is pregnant, such as Will I be a good mother? and How will I afford a child? But I was unprepared for the bigger questions like How does this redefine my concept of Woman and Feminine? and Is becoming a mother giving into patriarchal expectations? For a feminist and a scholar, these are life changing reflections that not only alter one's perspective, but also reconstruct reality. I had been taught with such gusto that children and husbands cage a woman into domestic life, as if having a family were more like a prison sentence then a chosen pursuit of happiness. I didn't want to be the caged bird, but I realized, quite abruptly, that I did very much want to be a mother. (Deciding I wanted to become my partner's wife came a little later, but came all the same.) With my impending doom less than 9 months away, I set out to deconstruct what motherhood really means and how it is possible to be both a feminist and a mom.
They are great ideas, but not all they are cracked up to be when applied to the real world. It didn't take me long to realize that my power hungry female friends were not so different than my power hungry male friends, and I really didn't appreciate either. It was easy for me to buy into the no-commitments, no-children way of life because I had lost my parents at ten years old and was terrified of trying to learn how to love anyone after being isolated for so long. But that didn't really work out either. I was constantly looking for someone to share my life with, but my reservations about commitment kept me from ever truly trusting anyone, keeping myself closed off and lonely. I had big dreams about moving to New York, having my own flat, being an editor for a publishing house, and spending my life travelling and having as little responsbility as life would allow. Except I didn't want to do it alone. I was lost in ambivalence about what I believed I should be doing as a woman of the twenty-first century and what it was that I truly wanted to do.
The August after I turned twenty-two changed all of that. I was pregnant. The father of my unborn child was my parnter of six months, but I knew without a shadow of doubt he would be a wonderful father... more than that, I loved him and realized I didn't want to imagine my life without him in it. We did our share of talking and fighting and going back and forth about what bringing a child into the world would do to our relationship, our careers, and our personal lives, but in the end we both still very much wanted this little miracle growing in my uterus. So it began. Unmarried, still in school, and without much of a plan, I travelled blindly into the next stage of my life: Motherhood.
There are many "normal" thoughts that cross a woman's mind while she is pregnant, such as Will I be a good mother? and How will I afford a child? But I was unprepared for the bigger questions like How does this redefine my concept of Woman and Feminine? and Is becoming a mother giving into patriarchal expectations? For a feminist and a scholar, these are life changing reflections that not only alter one's perspective, but also reconstruct reality. I had been taught with such gusto that children and husbands cage a woman into domestic life, as if having a family were more like a prison sentence then a chosen pursuit of happiness. I didn't want to be the caged bird, but I realized, quite abruptly, that I did very much want to be a mother. (Deciding I wanted to become my partner's wife came a little later, but came all the same.) With my impending doom less than 9 months away, I set out to deconstruct what motherhood really means and how it is possible to be both a feminist and a mom.
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